Are the CIJs Feeling Beleaguered?

The CIJs recently lashed out at a magazine article critical of their work and to a certain degree of the Court as a whole.

Naturally, what begs a question is what the judicial officers of the ECCC are doing counter-attacking the media. Besides it being undignified and unworthy of the office they hold, it is extremely unlikely that their job descriptions contain media interaction. Their job descriptions is what we, the taxpayers of the countries which fund the UN and this court, are paying them for; if media interaction and participation in the public debate of their performance was intended to be part of their mandate, it would have been incorporated in their respective terms of references.

Another question this statement begs is whether it was used as an opportunity to retaliate against the Nazi cartoons (discussed earlier on this forum) which were off-color but which should not have merited the attention and official response of persons whom we expect to be esteemed judicial officers.

Lastly, the CIJs' insecurity about their decision to terminate Case 003 is understandable: they can't tell us a good story about why it happened; while it is well-appreciated that the CIJs are not required by law to explain their decisions to terminate cases to the public, they might be feeling -- and many of us do too -- that they are duty-bound to do so.

As a postscript to this, the International Justice Tribune's article revealed that all persons interviewed for it knew the identities of the suspects in Cases 003 and 004 (and knew them long enough to have been able to make their personal conclusions about these persons' suitability for prosecution); hence is the question for the International Co-Prosecutor and the CIJs: don't the Internal Rules say something about the secrecy of investigations? what happened and why doesn't anyone seem to be concerned about this?